Nick Cave interview

Old Nick.

He has been spitting hellfire and damnation for years, but now that he has turned 50, is Nick Cave finally mellowing? Of course not, he tells Simon Hattenstone

Interview by Simon Hattenstone
Saturday February 23, 2008
The Guardian


A high-maintenance kind of guy ... Nick Cave.

Photograph: Muzi Quawson

Nick Cave is sitting behind his desk, long of limb and droopy of tache. He's wearing a suit, of course. Super-smart. And yet there's something distinctly spivvy about him. I feel as if I'm being interviewed for a job by a secondhand car salesman in a John Waters film. But instead of cars, Cave is flogging film scripts, novels, lectures and, of course, music.

Cave is one of rock's greats. While many of his fans expected the once heroin-addled gothic punk to be long dead by now, he's actually creating more than ever. He gets up early, goes to work in his office (a flat connected to his house in Hove), does an honest day's work, returns home in the evening to his wife and kids, and starts out again the next day. He doesn't take drugs, he doesn't drink, he doesn't even smoke. In one way, he says, life is no longer worth living; in others, he says, it has never been better.

It's 30 years since Cave first made himself heard with the Birthday Party. He was tall and gangly, black-haired, with spectre-white skin, beautiful despite his spoilt-boy's snub nose - and inexplicably angry. Unlike their British counterparts, the Birthday Party - all of them Australian - weren't railing against the monarchy or the establishment. They were simply railing. The music was cacophonous and spit-furious, and occasionally heartbreakingly tender. They were always going to implode, and when they did in the early 80s, Cave went on to form the Bad Seeds, who were to all intents and purposes his backing band. He took more drugs, drank more, moved from Melbourne to London to Berlin to New York to Sao Paulo, all the time travelling farther down the road to nihilistic obliteration. His lyrics preached Old Testament-style hellfire and damnation, then he discovered the New Testament and wrote love songs, even if they still ended in bloody despair.

Whenever you think you understand Nick Cave, he chucks something different in your face. As he segues into his 50s, his latest album with the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, visits familiar New Testament territory, but now Lazarus is in 70s New York, and he's lost and confused and can't make head nor tail of the modern world. In another persona, as Grinderman on a previous album last year, he blasted out songs about being a literate ageing rocker who can no longer get the chicks ("I read her Eliot, I read her Yeats, I tried my best to stay up late, but she still didn't want to"). The accompanying video shows young people shagging, pigs, goats, rabbits, everybody at it - except Cave. "Igot the no-pussy blues," he screams in libidinous despair. In between, he and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis turned their hand to a classical film score for The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.

In Cave's office, there are two pianos, a double-neck guitar and enough books to fill a library. His desk is cluttered with the paraphernalia of his work - lyric sheets, pens, the old-fashioned cassettes on which he records new songs. Above his head is a painting of Christ in all his suffering. There are leather sofas and prints on the wall of cats in varying degrees of derangement. He says he would find it impossible to work at home with his wife, the model Susie Bick, and their seven-year-old twin sons. He often complains that musicians are the laziest bastards in the world, writing 12 songs every two years, and they haven't got a clue what real work is like. Much of the time, he sits in the office, doing nothing, waiting for inspiration, ditching ideas. These dead periods are not enjoyable, but they are necessary. Sunday is his day off.

When Cave gets a passion for something, it often becomes an obsession. I ask about those cats. He tells me they are by the Victorian artist Louis Wain, a man who became schizophrenic after his wife died and whose illness is reflected in his increasingly delirious portraits of cats. "Look, Google it." "Google it" is one of Cave's favourite expressions. Ask about his past and he'll often tell you to Google that as well.

There is something terse and scary about Cave - which is not surprising, considering he's spent so long modelling himself as a modern-day Beelzebub - but he can be gentle and seductive, too. He smiles and laughs (even at himself) more often than you might expect. YouTube the Birthday Party and the Boys Next Door (their original incarnation) and you can find the two extremes of early Nick Cave. On Shivers, he looks like a punk Bryan Ferry - a gorgeous, suited-and-booted crooner. On the live recording of Nick The Stripper, he is screeching self-loathing lyrics, dressed in a nappy.

Cave grew up in rural Victoria, Australia. His father, Colin, taught English and maths at the local school; his mother, Dawn, was its librarian. Cave loved the epic landscape, but hated the attitudes of small-town Australia. It was the early 70s and he was influenced by David Bowie and Lou Reed and Iggy Pop - songwriters, performers, heroes of pop's avant garde. Everything cool seemed continents away in London and New York, and Cave wanted some of it.

By the time he was 12 he was getting into trouble, so his parents packed him off to a boarding school in Melbourne. That's where he met the boys who went on to become the Birthday Party. "We were interested in art and we weren't particularly interested in sport, so we were considered homosexuals. There's no two ways about it - we were the school poofters." There's a story that Cave and his friends walked through school one day carrying handbags, and when people shouted abuse at them, they walloped them with the bags, each of which contained a brick. Is that true? He looks weary. "Oh, you're only interested in the truth rather than a good, entertaining article."

Does he prefer a lie? "No, but there are times when the truth is necessary and times when myth-making is necessary. When you're talking about rock'n'roll, myth-making is what it's all about. Who wants to know the fucking truth about Jimi Hendrix? We want to know the myth. We want to know he got on that plane to England with that electric guitar, acne cream and pink hair curlers - that's all he brought."

Guitarist Mick Harvey met Cave at school and has played in bands with him ever since. "He always stood out," he says. "He flew in the face of authority." Was Harvey one of the handbag boys? He laughs. "What stories has he been telling you?"

Harvey didn't take drugs and for a time was teetotal, but the others more than made up for him. One night on stage, with Harvey playing drums, Cave threw a bottle over his shoulder and it hit him on the head. Harvey was livid. "But then, he was totally out of it." Did he worry for them? "No, when you're that age you don't really think about the long-term effects. A couple of people did overdose in the mid-80s. Then Tracy [the Birthday Party's bassist] developed epilepsy, which I suspected was through a combination of taking drugs and drinking very heavily, and we know how that ended." Tracy Pew died after an epileptic fit in 1986.

Punk provocateur Lydia Lunch supported the Birthday Party in 1981. She and Cave didn't hit it off. "We were on two separate planets. I was wild, uninhibited. Even though he's an extrovert on stage, he was very shy." Lunch calls Cave one of the great poets, and remembers the first time he showed her his work - thousands of handwritten words, so small you needed a magnifying glass to read them. "He was so hyper-conscious and so sensitive, which is beautiful to me, but it's a painful road to take." Was he depressive? "He was a heroin addict - of course he was fucking depressive."

When Cave was 19, his father was killed in a car crash. Colin Cave was a serious man who believed culture was the answer to society's ills: beauty would save the world. His philosophy seemed to inspire and enrage Cave - he himself looked for beauty, but what he found was corrupted and destructive. At the time of his death, his father and he had drifted apart. Where was he when he found out his father had died?

"I really don't want to go into all that."

Why not? "It upsets me. Google it, just Google it."

When I get home I do Google it, and discover that Cave had been at a police station, being charged with burglary. His mother, as usual, was at the station bailing him out. Shortly afterwards, having failed the second year of his art course at college, Cave and the Birthday Party left Australia for England.

A few weeks after our first meeting, I meet Cave and most of the Bad Seeds in London where they are recording a trailer for the new album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! They are re-enacting a seance in a darkened room. Cave is wearing a turban - he looks strange even by his standards. He is improvising his lines and keeps bursting out laughing. I tell him he's corpsing. He's never heard the expression, but he likes it. I'm staring at his hair. Surely, it can't be that black now... yet the sideburns and tache are a perfect match.

His twin boys, Earl and Arthur, are there - Arthur plays drums, Earl is on guitar. I ask Earl who's a better guitarist, him or his dad. "Me," he answers instantly. The boys are excited. They are about to head off for the premiere of Dr Who with Kylie Minogue. Cave had his one reasonably big hit with Minogue in 1995 - Where The Wild Roses Grow. It gave him commercial viability and her a new creative credibility. The song is about a man who can possess his beloved only by stoving her head in ("I kissed her goodbye and said all love must die").

Love, possession and violent death are recurrent themes in his work. Perhaps his best-known song is The Mercy Seat, about an unrepentant con on death row, which was recorded by Johnny Cash shortly before he died. Cash is one of Cave's heroes - another songwriter wrestling with the notions of redemption and retribution, and the man who showed Cave that popular music could be bleak, with a whiff of evil. He also admires Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone, two singer-songwriters who have plumbed the depths.

He tells me how Cash's producer, Rick Rubin, rang to ask permission to record The Mercy Seat. "My stomach is dropping out at this point. I said, 'I'll think about it, Rick' and I waited half a minute and came back and said, 'Nah, I don't have any objections' and he chuckled and said, 'I didn't think you would.' "

Why did he wait? "I wanted to play it cool."

The notion of cool has always been important to Cave. At times, in his white, three-piece suits, he has almost come across as a parody of himself, hovering close to Saturday Night Fever territory. Did he work at it? "No, I was just always cool." He laughs, but I think he means it. "Sometimes it crosses paths with what's fashionable, and then I become obsolete again."

Susie Bick, Cave's wife and a former Vivienne Westwood muse, watches while the video is made. She is beautiful, with black hair and very pale skin, not wholly unlike Cave. When they met, she says, "We had just broken up from relationships and we were both heartbroken. We were mostly thinking about being heartbroken. It was very intense, but even so it took us about two years to go on a date. We were a bit shy, actually."

What's Cave like? "He's just adorable. He's just the warmest person, he's got the biggest heart."

But isn't he supposed to be the antichrist? "I know!" She giggles. "He's so the opposite of what people imagine. And he's the best dad in the world." It's not what we want to hear about Nick Cave.

Cave and fellow Australian Warren Ellis are sitting at a table, eating burgers and whingeing about the way they are portrayed by the media - drugs, booze and bad behaviour. "Such an old story," says Ellis, who is Cave's chief collaborator. He joined the band in 1995, to play a bit of violin on the album Let Love In, and stayed. Both were addicted to heroin, but Ellis was trying to stop.

Now they regard themselves as workaholics. "The day we finish mixing this, it's like, 'Right, do the next one,' " Ellis says. "It's really addictive. The more you make, the more you want to make."

Even in their junkie days, though, they worked hard. Cave says addiction didn't hamper creativity, except when they were sick or out scoring. He hasn't touched drugs for 10 years. "I'd like to say Susie stopped me. But the truth is that nobody can kick that stuff for you. You have to do it yourself. That I was head over heels in love with the most beautiful woman on the planet didn't hurt, though."

Look through Cave's work and you see the geography of his influences - Australia in the landscape, Germany in the sound and fury of early Bad Seeds records, America and Britain in his pop heroes. While living in Germany, Cave spent three years in a bedsit - the walls covered with religious and pornographic images - writing his 1989 novel And The Ass Saw The Angel. It tells the story of Euchrid Eucrow, a vengeful mute living in a fundamentalist community in America's south. Overwritten maybe, but the book is a beautifully imagined horror story illuminated by stark images ("Mah father loomed over me like a crooked stick"). More disturbingly than Cave's songs, it portrays a world of gratuitous cruelty and a religion founded on retribution.

Eucrow, in his feral world, and Cave have this at least in common - both hear voices in their heads. Sometimes Cave's voices tell him he can do anything and leave him spent and exhausted: in the past, he took heroin to still the voices and himself. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of projects, the voices tell him he's a hopeless loser.

Another day, another suit. It's mid-January, and Cave is carrying a heavy case and heading off to Paris to promote the new album. He is slurping his tea and we are talking children. As well as the twins, he says, he has two 16-year-old boys. Blimey, I say, two sets of twins. "Erm, no. They were very... they were quite close to each other."

Months? "Well, less, actually."

"Bloody hell, Nick," I say as it dawns on me what he's saying.

"It's a wonderful thing, but..."

"Did it not cause domestic strife?

"It was difficult at the time, but it turned out great in the end." Jethro was born in Australia, Luke 10 days later in Brazil, where Cave was living with his mother, the stylist Viviane Carneiro. "To my eternal regret I didn't make much contact with Jethro in the early years. I now have a great relationship with him."

He's not telling me any more. "Google it, you fucker. Google it. There are things you read in Hello! and you think, 'Why the fuck are these people talking about these type of things?' There's this culture of confession and admission, and I find it nauseating."

For all that, Cave did once make an astonishingly personal record - The Boatman's Call in 1997. It is regarded by many as his most beautiful album. It's about breaking up with Luke's mother, falling in love with the musician PJ Harvey (another woman with dark hair and pale skin who bears more than a passing resemblance to him) - and having his heart broken by her. It's one of the most nakedly romantic, and desolate, records ever made. In Far From Me, the penultimate song, he sings, "It's good to hear you're doing so well/But really, can't you find somebody else that you can ring and tell?/Did you ever care for me?/Were you ever there for me?/So far from me."

Was he aware at the time...? "That I was doing the big confessional record? No, no. When I was making half that record I was furious because certain things had happened in my love life that seriously pissed me off. And some of those songs came straight out of that." Does it embarrass him now? "I don't regret making it but, yeah, it does a bit, because the songs are of a moment when you felt a certain way. When you don't any more, you just think, 'Fuck - please!' "

He asks if I've seen the video he and Harvey made for the song Henry Lee, and raises an eyebrow. "Fucking hell! That's a one-take video. Nothing is rehearsed at all except we sit on this 'love seat'. We didn't know each other well, and this thing happens while we're making the video. There's a certain awkwardness, and afterwards it's like, oh..." So you were beginning the relationship in this three-minute video? "Yeah, exactly."

He says he and Susie (pictured overleaf) were recently trawling the internet and came across the video. "She said, 'I do think it's a wonderful video, but I must say I do find it rather hard to watch.' "

His love songs always evoke the inevitability of loss - a feeling fuelled by his father's early death. In 1998 at the Vienna Poetry Festival, Cave gave a lecture on the love song in which he said, "The actualising of God through the medium of the love song remained my prime motivation as an artist." Even on The Boatman's Call, one of his most secular records, many of the songs are like contemporary psalms ("Into my arms, O Lord/Into my arms, O Lord"). In a South Bank Show profile, the film-maker Wim Wenders said, "His songs deal with a desire for pure love or this longing for peace in spite of all the turmoil and unrest happening inside him." Author Will Self put it more earthily, calling them "songs of spiritual yearning dressed in Ann Summers".

I ask Cave why his work is so dominated by God - in the early days, a vengeful God at that. He says that's hard to answer - he's never been the type of writer who looks at the world and expresses what he thinks; instead, he writes and in the writing his vision of the world is shaped. "The brutality of the Old Testament inspired me, the stories and grand gestures. I wrote that stuff up and it influenced the way I saw the world. What I'm trying to say is I didn't walk around in a rage thinking God is a hateful god. I was influenced by looking at the Bible, and it suited me in my life vision at the time to see things in that way."

Why? "Well, things were crap at the time... in my personal life." Because of a vengeful God? "No, I was just crap. It wasn't a gnashing of teeth, Job kind of thing, though I did have a lot of skin complaints, things like that." He smiles. "Yeah, I had a lot of pestilence visited upon me by a vengeful God - you know, scabies, crabs, general stuff like that." Wasn't that because of the sex and drugs? "Well, you've got to blame someone, haven't you?"

I ask whether he really does believe in a greater force, or would he just like to be a believer? "I do believe, but my belief system is so riddled with doubt that it's barely a belief system at all - I see that as a strength rather than a failing."

Cave says you can roughly divide his work - the 70s and 80s is Old Testament, the 90s and onwards is New Testament. "After a while I started to feel a little kinder and warmer to the world, and at the same time started to read the New Testament."

He has a way of smiling when he feels things are wrong or have been misinterpreted. A little-boy smile. "Look," he says, almost apologetically, "when I look back, from 20 onwards, I was actually having a pretty good time, I have to say. I don't look back to 'What a miserable fucking time.' In general I'm a pretty up, buoyant, optimistic kind of person."

Do people think you're a moper? "I hope they don't, but I suspect they do." Maybe that's because there are so many songs about... He completes the sentence for me: "Death and shit."

So is Nick Cave a character? "I don't think so. It's not that I don't feel those things - I feel those things very strongly." He has his lows, when everything feels unbearable and insurmountable, but they are less frequent than they once were. Perhaps, like Leonard Cohen and Samuel Beckett, once he's put his existential angst to paper, he can get on with the important business of living life. "At the end, we're kind of observers - creative people, I mean. I feel like an observer, and I'm pretty much able to step out of things and see how things are playing out."

I'm staring at Cave's jet-black hair, wondering. Does he think he's getting too old to rock at 50? "Yeah, I do think that sometimes. I mean, the whole fame thing is incredibly undignified, anyway. You're allowing yourself to be exposed. A lot of it you can get away with because you're young, but you should know better by the time you reach 50. But, for me, I get such huge benefits for my own psyche, creating, working, that it doesn't at the moment seem an option to do anything about that."

Actually, he says, there is so much rubbish talked about age - as if, when you hit certain landmarks, you start to think and act differently. He's getting quite worked up as he talks and it becomes apparent that age itself is the new authority figure to rebel against. "There's a certain wisdom we are supposed to get, and I'm not really convinced that happens. I mean, you're wiser to a degree. But there's a certain archetype - a tried and tested road for artists in their autumn years: more meditative, less concerned with temporal things and more concerned with spiritual things, all that sort of stuff - I was looking forward to that, but it hasn't really arrived." In fact, Cave says, if anything, he's gone the opposite way. He's been doing the deathly stuff for decades and now he's more concerned with the physical world. "There are things that preoccupy me now that feel weirdly adolescent." What like? "Like sex." He knows it's supposed to be taboo, a little unsavoury, for a man of his age to write or sing about sex but, sorry, that is what he's interested in, so that's what you'll be getting.

And I'm still looking at Cave's hair. Is that really his natural colour? He bursts out laughing. "I've been dyeing my hair since I was 16."

What colour would it be? "I hate to think."

What about the tache and sideboards? "You have a special little brush and stuff. Look, I'm a high-maintenance kind of guy."

Will he ever stop dyeing his hair? God no, he says.

"No, I'll dye it till I die."

· Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! is out on March 3.

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